Hello Compost: Trading Food Waste for Local, Healthy Food

When we pilot Hello Compost later this year with Project EATS, we're striving to give as much control of the service to the community by designing our collection bags to be produced locally and respond to resident’s needs. Our durable canvas bags are designed to be freezable to reduce odors typically associated with food waste. They're also attractive and fun to use—an important feature to get people excited about participating.

Once residents fill up these bags, they can be delivered to a Project EATS market and weighed in order to give a corresponding credit amount towards produce from Project EATS. Project EATS then collects this food waste and turns it into compost, which can be sold commercially to help fund the service. In the future, we foresee this exchange being facilitated through a mobile application designed to track how many credits each family has earned. With mobile devices owned by Project EATS, this data can be used to not only manage the logistics of the service, but to visualize the positive impact residents are making in their community.

Put simply, food waste is too valuable to go to waste. We see it as an opportunity to revolutionize our relationship with food by introducing a service that makes waste collection more than a curbside burden. It's a way to create opportunities to better understand where food comes from, where food goes, and to give families the chance to make a positive impact for themselves and their community.